Helicopter Research Research Articles

Helicopter research: A persistent drawback to equitable collaborative research

Helicopter research: A persistent drawback to equitable collaborative research

AGU Publications Updates Authorship Policy to Foster Greater Equity and Transparency in Global Research Collaborations

AbstractAGU Publications encourages research collaborations between regions, countries, and communities. When well‐resourced researchers complete research or field work in low‐resourced settings while excluding local communities or researchers from the process, this can be referred to as parachute science or helicopter research. To help address concerns of parachute science and to promote greater equity and transparency in global research collaborations, AGU Publications has updated its authorship policy across its scholarly journals. The implementation of this policy follows a successful 18‐month pilot at JGR: Biogeosciences. For research completed in low‐resourced regions, authors are encouraged to include a disclosure statement pertaining to the ethical and scientific considerations of their research collaborations.

Ending “domestic helicopter research”

"Helicopter research" refers to a practice where researchers from wealthier countries conduct studies in lower-income countries with little involvement of local researchers or community members. This practice also occurs domestically. In this Commentary, we outline strategies to curb domestic helicopter research and to foster equity-centered collaborations.

Multidisciplinary approach to community engagement in global public health research.

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the role of community engagement in knowledge production and ethical issues such as 'helicopter research', indicating exploitative research activities of some researchers as well as short-term relationships with research communities especially in low- and middle-income countries. This approach is detrimental to both communities and the larger scientific community as this may breed mistrust. Major institutions such as the National Institute of Health and Care Research in the United Kingdom have highlighted the importance of community engagement as a tool to improve the reach, quality, and impact of the research by incorporating the voices and concerns of marginalized communities. Similarly, in its 2022 guidance, the American Society for Human Genetics (ASGH) highlights the need to address underrepresentation in genomics research through community engagement. Establishing ethical and meaningful long-term relationships can be challenging especially for researchers who are not members of the community or those from other countries. This article describes how 'community-engaged research' can address some ethical challenges in global public health in different cultural settings.

Multidisciplinary approach to community engagement in global public health research

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the role of community engagement in knowledge production and ethical issues such as ‘helicopter research’, indicating exploitative research activities of some researchers as well as short-term relationships with research communities especially in low- and middle-income countries. This approach is detrimental to both communities and the larger scientific community as this may breed mistrust. Major institutions such as the National Institute of Health and Care Research in the United Kingdom have highlighted the importance of community engagement as a tool to improve the reach, quality, and impact of the research by incorporating the voices and concerns of marginalized communities. Similarly, in its 2022 guidance, the American Society for Human Genetics (ASGH) highlights the need to address underrepresentation in genomics research through community engagement. Establishing ethical and meaningful long-term relationships can be challenging especially for researchers who are not members of the community or those from other countries. This article describes how ‘community-engaged research’ can address some ethical challenges in global public health in different cultural settings.

Ethical implications of secondary data analysis and helicopter research

Ethical implications of secondary data analysis and helicopter research

Countering helicopter research with equitable partnerships

Countering helicopter research with equitable partnerships

Helicopter research and Ethics dumping- A Mapping Review

In helicopter research, the researchers from developed or privileged countries fly to poor setting countries and conduct research with limited involvement of local communities or researchers. Helicopter research is still pervasive as evidenced by the recent study. This mapping review focus on helicopter research and ethics dumping and the ways to tackle and avoid it.

Patient-centricity: Research's new shibboleth?

Patient-centricity: Research's new shibboleth?

Helicopter research and its effects on project sustainability

Helicopter research and its effects on project sustainability

Advancing DEI in research publishing – putting strategy into practice

In September 2021, Springer Nature made a formal commitment to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) across our external Research & Solutions activities. Since then, our journals, books and magazines are elevating issues of diversity, representation, equity, justice and much more in both their content and their processes. From launching the industry’s first guide to content that may be harmful to human population groups, a new approach to ethics dumping and helicopter research, a transgender name change policy and Nature’s first ever guest edition on racism in science: we’ve taken steps to integrate DEI into the way we work and the content we create. This poster will talk about our experience so far turning strategy into practice, and the projects we’re planning for the near future from language guides to data collection.

Research Frameworks for Multiple Ways of Knowing

The COVID-19 pandemic, the treatment and death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter and the MeToo movements, and restrictive immigration policies have more recently brought to the forefront the inequities in our everyday lives. From the inequity of access to COVID-19 vaccines across the globe, inequities of the treatment of people of color and women and access to broadband and online information, social justice issues have prompted not only increased media attention but also an increase in scholarly research. “There are five goals of social justice: access to resources, equity (provision of equitable resources that focus on the needs of communities and their members), diversity, participation in policy making by diverse groups, and human rights regardless of socioeconomic status (freedom of speech, voting rights, and other basic rights)” (Connaway and Radford, 2021, 442). These also correspond to the underlying principles of librarianship – access to information and the technology to obtain this information regardless of religion, political affiliation, gender identity, race, or economic and educational levels and intellectual freedom. The digital divide, the disparity between those who have access to technology and those who do not based on educational and economic levels, creates an imbalance of access to information. Equal access to broadband, information, healthcare, education, and socio-economic opportunities are critical issues in engaging social justice in LIS pedagogy and research. Social justice research is not new to the scholarly community, including the library and information science (LIS) community. However, the current social and economic environments have increased the awareness of inequitable practices and policies and the shortcomings of LIS offerings, programming, collections, procedures, and practices. These biases are present in our classification systems, knowledge management, vocabularies, algorithms used for discovery and access, and in our hiring, promotion and retention practices and policies in regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion in an international and development context. Integrating inclusive and equitable policies and practices into the LIS curricula also is imperative for preparing future professionals to meet the continually changing needs of diverse staff and communities. The panelists will discuss how LIS researchers and educators are integrating social justice into their scholarship and teaching, within a context of decolonizing research and advancing multiple ways of knowing. They then will highlight LIS social justice research, methodologies, and frameworks as well as future directions for research. Examples of how these research findings can be translated into LIS curricula will be highlighted. Lynn Silipigni Connaway will provide an overview of some of the social justice research topics being addressed in the LIS literature. She also will discuss ways to include diversity in research sampling and to be more inclusive in our participant recruitment and collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of our findings. Clara M. Chu will introduce the scholarship of dialogue framework for LIS research that engages the voice of the research participants to provide them agency and enhance equity throughout the research process. She will discuss the perils of drive-by and helicopter research when studying the Other, including conducting research in marginalized and Global South communities. Dick Kawooya will discuss information policy research, why it is important, and how to integrate it into LIS curricula. Information policy research provides a unique opportunity to address social justice and inequality because it focuses on identifying social problems associated with information, segments of society affected by the problems, recommends solutions in the form of policy choices and if policy choices are implemented, it informs distribution of public and private resources (Braman, 2011). Information policy research focuses on issues such as the digital divide, library funding (school and public), censorship, privacy, net neutrality, data protection and integrity, intellectual property, and others. He will show why and how the above policy issues should be integrated across the LIS curriculum and which marginalized communities should be the center for each policy issue. Andiswa Mfengu will provide a discussion on socially just research impact assessment support from the LIS discipline. Research and research impact assessment have been greatly transformed over the years and thus providing an opportunity for the LIS discipline to explore equitable and context-sensitive approaches that cater for marginalized groups; and how these approaches can be embedded in LIS scholarship and education. She will discuss challenges and propose solutions on how research impact assessment support from the LIS discipline can be more inclusive, flexible, and equitable in practice and in curricula.

Tackling helicopter research

Tackling helicopter research

Dispirited Away: The Peer Review Process

Dispirited Away: The Peer Review Process

Community-Engaged Research With Indigenous Communities to Improve Elder Health and Well-Being

Much of the past research conducted with tribal communities was coined "helicopter research," because researchers would enter the community, gather data, and leave the community, never to inform communities how the data was used or published, creating mistrust. Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is a research approach conducted as an equal partnership between community members, organizational representatives, and researchers that serve as guidelines for researchers working collaboratively with communities. This symposium will offer a panel of presentations highlighting research studies with tribal communities that honor and respect tribal sovereignty in addressing health and wellbeing among their older adults. The panel presentations will consist of presentations on dementia caregiving, generativity and successful aging, social support and diabetes management, elder-centered research methods.

Description of a Dynamical Framework to Analyse the Helicopter Tail Rotor

In this work, a tail rotor is modelled with the aid of a multibody software to provide an alternative tool in the field of helicopter research. This advanced application captures the complex behaviour of tail rotor dynamics. The model has been built by using VehicleSim software (Version 1.0, Mechanical Simulation Corporation, Ann Arbor, MI, USA) specialized in modelling mechanical systems composed of rigid bodies. The dynamic behaviour and the control action are embedded in the code. Thereby, VehicleSim does not need an external link to another software package. The rotors are articulated, the tail rotor considers flap and feather degrees of freedom for each of the equispaced blades and their dynamic couplings. Details on the model’s implementation are derived, emphasising the modelling aspects that contribute to the coupled dynamics. The obtained results are contrasted with theoretical approaches and these have displayed to agree with the expected behaviour. This rotorcraft model helps to study the performance of a tail rotor under certain dynamic conditions.

Biocolonialism and Informed Consent. The Havasupai Case

"A core value in research ethics is respect for individual’s autonomy. For the researcher the way to respect this value is to guarantee informed consent to the participants. Nowadays more and more research is conducted on biological material of human origin rather than on humans. But apart from that, informed consent must be guaranteed. The case I would like to present and comment is the Havasupai case. Havasupai are an indigenous tribe lived in Grand Canyon. Due to the high percentage of diabetes type 2 among members of the tribe, the tribe decided to take part in the research conducted by the researchers from Arizona State University. In this case were a few vague aspects, which I will present during the speech, but one thing I especially notice. In the scientific community there was a great interest in obtaining Havasupai blood samples. It was caused by the fact that Havasupai are an indigenous people and they do not start a family with people out of them tribe. Because of that their DNA is scientifically more interesting than the DNA of people out of the tribe. That approach is called biocolonialism. In the past indigenous people were used because of the sources that they had on their lands. Now their DNA is a scientifically valuable source of information. Moreover, in literature it is said that researchers – the new (bio)colonizers – are conducting a “helicopter research”. They came up, took what they want and disappear. In my speech I would like to analyze problems raised in Havasupai case and present what the biocolonialism means in and for research. "

The Unsettlement of Tourism Studies: Positive Decolonization, Deep Listening, and Dethinking Today

Recent years have witnessed the rise of many new and/or corrective approaches across the social sciences that have challenged the received assumptive frameworks through which the world is inspected and interpreted methodologically. Late decades have brought the rise of a new generation of scholars who work through "resistance politics" approaches in pursuit of, for instance, social justice causes or posthumanist convictions. The purpose of this article (and its two companion articles in later issues of Tourism, Culture & Communication) is to capture the possibilities and the tensions in the development and cultivation of such "disruptive" or "promiscuous" research acts, and to conceptually situate them within Tourism Studies—the domain that covers the "worldmaking"/"declarative power" of tourism to interpret and inscribe the peoples, places, pasts, and presents across the globe. In principally mining the neoteric and landmark text Disruptive Qualitative Inquiry (Brown, Carducci, and Kuby), an attempt is made to locate the interruptive craft of such unfolding disruptive thinking of and about tourism as rising numbers of Tourism Studies researchers themselves seek to decolonize their methodologies from the stranglehold of Western Modern Science and reverberate more positively with populations that have been subjugated or suppressed through tourism. In building up to the provision of a 30-term glossary (cumulatively provided across the said three companion articles) delineating the fresh thinking that is involved in such disruptive inquiry, this first article targets approaches that beckon forms of interpretive plural knowability, which demand the fluid acumen to map the less-fixed/fast-changeable populations of our time, and which are thereby decent yet rigorous in their critical multilogicality ; hence, this first article glossary covers terms such as "reversing the binaries," "promiscuous methodologies," and "working the hyphens." In this innovative light, the second companion article glossary identifies conceptualizations such as "guided wandering," "postqualitative research," and "survivance" in order to expand the ontology and epistemology of Tourism Studies, while the glossary in the third article offers conceptualizations such as "uncrossable methodolodies," "helicopter research," and "stuckness," which—in their different ways—speak to the transformative rhetorics of futurity for tourism and the peoples and places of the world.

Challenges and Recommendations for Equitable Use of Aerial Tools for Mangrove Research

As the use of aerial tools such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for mangrove monitoring gains in popularity, understanding who leads this research and where is critical for expanding efficient monitoring methods and achieving international commitments to sustainable development, technology transfer and reduced inequality. Between 2000 and 2019, mangrove research using aerial tools was largely conducted in and led by institutions in higher income countries, despite High-income countries accounting for only 9% of global mangrove coverage. Of studies where the country of the lead institution differed from that of the study site, only 38% of the studies included local co-authors. These results echo historical patterns of research conducted by researchers from higher income countries on biodiversity concentrated in lower income countries, frequently with limited involvement of local scientists—known as “helicopter research.” The disconnect between where mangroves are located and where aerial research is conducted may result from barriers such as government restrictions, limited financial and technical resources, language barriers hindering UAV deployment, or hampered findability of local research. Our findings suggest that expertise for aerial surveys currently lies in “High-income, Annex II” and “Upper-middle-income, Non-Annex” countries, and both groups could invest time and resources in building local, long-term technological capacity in Upper-middle, Lower-middle and Low-income countries. We identify strategic partnerships to expand aerial tools for mangrove research that also address commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and potential international collaborations under the framework proposed by the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.

Letter to the Editor: Response to Global soil science research collaboration in the 21st century: Time to end helicopter research by Minasny et al

Budiman Minasny and colleagues (Minasny et al., 2020) are to be congratulated for their incisive article about helicopter research in soil science, as are the editors of Geoderma for their new policy such that papers reporting research with primary data collection should include authors from the countries concerned. On the basis of our shared experience, as collaborating investigators working on soil science research in sub-Saharan Africa, we recognize the importance of this issue and its wider implications for sustainability of both research collaboration and development partnerships. We are collaborators on the CEPHaS project, a project funded by the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund, which addresses the development of capacity in soil physics, geophysics, hydrogeology and statistics to study conservation agriculture, a suite of interventions aimed at improving resilience of soils and crops under climate change. CEPHaS involves researchers from Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and the United Kingdom – soil scientists, agronomists, agricultural economists, social scientists, geophysicists, hydrogeologists and statisticians. We have been collaborating on the project since October 2017, and many of us have been working together for longer than that. In this letter we share some aspects of our experience, practices and policies which we think go some way towards facilitating more equitable partnership in research. In summary, we think that the problem of helicopter research can be tackled only through the development of genuine partnerships, in which the global asymmetries of power and wealth between north and south are not allowed to distort the research agenda or to prevent equitable collaboration in which the interests, opportunities and contribution of all parties are respected. This requires a commitment to capacity strengthening and long-term engagement on the part of researchers, their institutions and the funders of research.